Using Pay groups with suppliers ..

A payment batch is used to create a group of payments that will be paid in one go. Creating a payment batch is discussed another article. My customer wanted to infuse logic into Oracle so that whenever a payment batch is created to make payments to special suppliers, the Select Invoice program would automatically select only those few suppliers’ invoices to be paid in a group and other supplier invoices would not be picked up for payment in the same group.
The solution was to create a Pay Group and attach the selected suppliers in the group to the Pay Group. Once the payment batch is created, the Pay Group is selected in the form to make payments to the group of suppliers. If the pay group is not selected then all suppliers will be paid off.
The implementation is given below:

Create the Pay Group

Responsibility: Payables Administrator
Navigation: Setup > Lookups > Purchasing
Query for Lookup PAY GROUP.

Pay Group lookup

Add new Pay Group, named FUEL

Add Pay Group "FUEL"

Code: FUEL
Meaning: FUEL
Description: Fuel suppliers group

Add the Pay Group to the supplier

Navigation: Suppliers > Entry
Query for a supplier and click on Payment tab on the supplier master.

Supplier master

Click on Pay Group field and add the new Pay Group, FUEL. Now click on Sites button and go to the Payment tab.

Supplier site

Modify the Pay Group on the supplier site to FUEL as well.
Note: It is more important to change the values on the supplier site level than at the supplier master level as the payments are made to the supplier sites and hence the values on site level always precede the same value at master level.

Create an invoice

Let us create an invoice for this supplier
Navigation: Invoices > Entry > Invoices
Create and invoice for the same supplier as above. You will find that the Pay Group is populated automatically.
If you do not get to see the Pay Group field, you need click on Folder > Show Field and select “Pay Group” field to view it on the form.

Create the invoice

Now let us pay this invoice using a payment batch.

Create Payment Batch

Navigate: Payments > Entry > Payment Batch
Create the payment batch and enter the Pay Group as FUEL.

Create payment batch

Click on Actions and execute Select Invoice and Build Payments. After the payments have been built the Payments button on the payment batch form is enabled. Click on this button to view the invoices selected.

The invoice that we had created has been selected for payment in this batch as we had set the Pay Group to FUEL and this was the only invoice for the supplier who is attached to this Pay Group. Thus by using Pay Group we can restrict invoice selection. This can be used when we would like to send a batch of payments for a selected group of customers to a selected bank.

To see the entire Payment Batch process in detail you can check this article.